Have you seen this chart yet? It’s the evolution of the “hipster” in the last decade:

Carol Phillips, author and professor of marketing at Notre Dame, wrote up an interesting little post on http://millenialmarketing.com where she argues, based on focus group research, that today’s cool kids ” are the ‘DOERS’ — the ones who are fixing, leading, changing, advocating, entrepreneuring in order to make a difference in the world.”

Here is another post where the author waxes poetic on the similarity between today’s hipsters and the nerds in 1980s films.

There are countless examples of the “Hipster nerd” dominating today’s popular culture; from rap artist Kid Cudi who wears skirts and listens to indie rock,  to Ocho Cinco who spends his time tweeting, ustreaming, and xboxing rather than clubbing.

Here is my issue. We are in an age where our access to data is unprecedented. However, the market research industry still largely bases their trend analysis off of focus groups and trend-spotting.

While focus groups and keeping tabs on media trends are powerful tools, don’t you think we can do a little better in this day and age with the treasure troves of data that we have at our finger tips?

Think that finding your target market through social data is far off? Think again. It’s already here:

Rapleaf:

While RapLeaf and others hold impressive promise for market research, it raises questions:

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